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President Rodrigo Duterte’s vituperation against the Roman Catholic Church is unprecedented in recent Philippine political history. Not even the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos’s record matches it.Yet, in a predominantly Catholic country, his outrageous display of irreligiosity appears to perturb only a few.

His harangue hits at the heart of Orthodox Christianity: the doctrine of the Trinity and the crucifixion of Christ. It highlights the biggest catechetical challenge as yet to the Filipino Church, even as it finds itself in yet another crossroads.

In the broader context, the Francis Papacy has exposed seismic rifts between Church progressives and traditionalists. His “Amoris Letitia” threatens to tear the very fabric of the Church’s existence; indeed, conservative Catholic leaders see his exhortation as an immoral rewriting of marriage, and a door through which liberal ideas are smuggled into the Church.

Too, the epidemic of pedophilia in the American Church and elsewhere that has devoured thousands, and Francis’s failure to decisively address it, has served to further undermine the global Church’s integrity as a clear moral voice amidst a postmodern amoral wilderness.Worse, the Vatican itself has been wracked by revelations of high immorality that would make even libertines blush.

Here, post-EDSA 1986 politics saw Catholic bishops playing footsie with the powers-that-be (think Pajero bishops!). This, even as they actively opposed the government’s program to promote family planning in the country and prosecuted such a harmless soul as Carlos Celdran for his schoolboy antics.

All we see now is a Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines reluctant to speak a common voice of conviction, not a body of believers a prophetic Cardinal Sin once led, although the recent bombing of the Jolo Cathedral, which killed 21 Catholic faithful and wounded nearly a hundred others,has forced them to issue a pastoral letter decrying the “cycle of hate” that has gripped the country.

The pastoral letter, issued at the close of the CBCP’s 118th plenary assembly, also made an oblique reference to the President’s anti-Catholic vitriol, but said they are responding to it with “silence and prayer.” At least, for now.

To my Protestant eyes, what we have is a Filipino Church at its politically weakest.

An astute politician, the President knows this. Like Arian Vandals besieging St. Augustine’s beloved city of Hippo and its Latin Christian culture, he is exploiting the crises facing the Church to whittle away at the foundations of what is potentially the sole unified opposition to his bloody drug war, and yes, his vision of the future.

He also understands that this is no longer the time of Thomas Aquinas, who, at the height of Christendom in Europe, taught that the Church has a moral right to excommunicate and depose from power a ruler who is leading the faithful away from the gospel.

But it is beautiful to see such weakness of the Church typified by Caloocan Bishop Pablo Virgilio David, a soft-spoken French-trained bible scholar who has chosen to walk with the poor and the powerless of his diocese.

Or by Sister Maria Juanita Daño, RGS, who has lived through the horrors of Oplan Tokhang in San Andres, Bukid with her fellow parishioners. Bishop Ambo and Sister Nenet exhibit the poverty of spirit of the Sermon on the Mount.Or by the Vincentian fathers who have given refuge to the families of victims of the deadly scourge of tokhang that has decimated scores of lives in urban poor communities in Quezon City.

They also reaffirm a central message delivered by Pope Pius XII from the Vatican on Christmas Day, 1942. In his address, Pius XII said every human power has a duty to give back to the human person “the dignity given to it by God from the very beginning.” This, said Pius XII, is only possible where people once again recognized a divinely instituted juridical order, one “which stretches forth its arm, in protection or punishment, over the unforgettable rights of man and protects them against the attacks of every human power.”

These brave words said at the height of the Nazi onslaught was “a critical turning point” for the idea of universal human rights, subsequently defining postwar history and shaping governments in Europe, argues Harvard law professor Samuel Moyn’s book “Christian Human Rights”(2015).

In 1945, diplomats drafted a Universal Declaration of Human Rights that echoed Pius XII’s words, saying the Declaration intends “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person.”

The Filipino Church badly needs to rediscover this legacy for such a time as ours.

This was my concluding remarks in a legal assessment of media ownership in the Philippines that I wrote for a project by Verafiles with the Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF)

Formal legal and constitutional protections on free expression abound in contemporary Philippines. But these have largely been pursued along the lines of an individualistic stress on the Bill of Rights, framed as guarantees against state encroachments into individual spheres of freedom.

But this is really to be expected from a dominant discourse of liberal political and legal theorizing on rights as inhering only to individuals; this is not to disparage individual rights, which are important as they are.

The Philippine Supreme Court has acknowledged the Bill of Rights’ debt to the Enlightenment idea of reason as a mode of discovering the truth in its different facets. But more than that, it frames the Bill of Rights, where the constitutional protections against restraints on free speech and free expression are embodied as a hedge around the state, as it were. Perhaps, one of the most eloquent and explicit declaration about the purpose of the protections it accords to the citizen has been made by constitutional scholar Joaquin Bernas, S.J. who, in explaining the intent of the provisions found in the Bill of Rights of the 1987 Charter, said:

First, the general reflections. The protection of fundamental liberties in the essence of constitutional democracy. Protection against whom? Protection against the state. The Bill of Rights governs the relationship between the individual and the state. Its concern is not the relation between individuals, between a private individual and other individuals. What the Bill of Rights does is to declare some forbidden zones in the private sphere inaccessible to any power holder.[1][italic ours]

But batting for media pluralism as a good state of affairs will not be helped by such a narrow frame of argumentation. This then will require a closer and creative reading of the Constitution and other legal sources, to be able to better account for why as a matter of state policy, a plurality of media sources in contemporary Philippine society would augur well for a vibrant public life.

There is, as the political philosopher Jonathan Chaplin remarks, borrowing from the legal philosopher Mary Ann Glendon, a missing dimension of “sociality” in much of liberal theorizing on institutional rights, which has been decidedly individualistic in orientation. “Because contemporary liberalism lacks an adequate notion of sociality,” says Chaplin, “liberal legal, constitutional, and political [theories] have proved unable to generate a convincing account of the reality and character of the legal rights of institutions”.[2]

As Chaplin argues, “[t]he empirical observation that many social institutions themselves do have positive legal rights is indisputable, yet liberal individualism seems unable to offer much beyond an implausible contractualist explanation of their origin and status”[3] Liberal theorists tend to construe the phenomenon of institutional rights as merely derived from the rights of associating individuals rather than as having some independent foundation and status not finally reducible to individual rights.

In practical terms, what this means is that the state ought to recognize the proper place of a plurality of institutions – in our case – of media institutions, in a democratic deliberation. Along that line, free expression as a right best flourishes with a legal framework where such a structural or an associational plurality is also promoted and pursued.

There are ample constitutional sources for safeguarding and ensuring media pluralism:

The Congress shall regulate or prohibit monopolies in commercial mass media when the public interest so requires. No combinations in restraint of trade or unfair competition therein shall be allowed. [CONST. art. XVI, sec. 11(1)]

The State shall regulate or prohibit monopolies when the public interest so requires. No combinations in restraint of trade or unfair competition shall be allowed.” [CONST. art. XII, sec. 19]

The State shall provide the policy environment for the full development of Filipino capability and the emergence of communication structures suitable to the needs and aspirations of the nation and the balanced flow of information into, out of, and across the country, in accordance with a policy that respects the freedom of speech and of the press[ CONST. art. XVI, Sec. 10]

The Congress shall give highest priority to the enactment of measures that protect and enhance the right of all the people to human dignity, reduce social, economic, and political inequalities, and remove cultural inequities by equitably diffusing wealth and political power for the common good [CONST. art. XIII, Sec. 2]

These constitutional provisions hammer the important point about “structural pluralism” as a corrollary to “viewpoint pluralism”, that for individual freedoms to flourish, they as well require the flourishing of various supporting institutions.

It is now a given that the right to free expression and the right to information are two sides of the same coin. One is the corollary of the other. The theory is that a better, rational, discussion of public matters is best achieved when citizens have at their disposal information pertinent to the issues at hand. The quality of such public discussion is only as good as the pertinent information made available to citizen-discussants.

An early theory of American constitutional design, expressed in an oft-quoted concurring opinion of J. Brandeis –a master of legal aphorisms – holds that:

Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties, and that, in its government, the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end, and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness, and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that, without free speech and assembly, discussion would be futile; that, with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine; that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty, and that this should be a fundamental principle of…. government.

They recognized the risks to which all human institutions are subject. But they knew that order cannot be secured merely through fear of punishment for its infraction; that it is hazardous to discourage thought, hope and imagination; that fear breeds repression; that repression breeds hate; that hate menaces stable government; that the path of safety lies in the opportunity to discuss freely supposed grievances and proposed remedies, and that the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones. Believing in the power of reason as applied through public discussion, they eschewed silence coerced by law — the argument of force in its worst form. Recognizing the occasional tyrannies of governing majorities, they amended the Constitution so that free speech and assembly should be guaranteed.[4]

Explicit in the necessity of providing citizens “an opportunity to discuss freely supposed grievances and proposed remedies” so as to build that “path to safety” towards a stable society is the requisite means – free speech and assembly; implicit in the process is the need to broaden the opportunity for public discussion by assuring a wide variety of avenues for it.

The legal and jurisprudential support for individual rights to free expression and right to information is robust and well developed in Philippine experience. But viewed in Glendon’s – and Chaplin’s – sense of sociality, the right to free expression and the right to information are now to be understood in a broader sense; that is, that the individual exercise of such rights must be correlated with institutional or associational support.

It is important that the news media maintain credible internal checks against the encroachment by the crass business bottom-line into the editorial room. Having said that, these internal checks guaranteed by the strict separation between the advertising room and the newsroom should be matched by external checks against a situation where a single dominant player in the media market controls both access to news and the news content.

The former is a function of how media owners understand the grand traditions that make good journalism work the way it should. The latter is a function of how the government understands the idea that a proliferation of independent news media assures the polity of a vibrant public discourse crucial to a functioning democracy. This is a question of extreme urgency, given contemporary trends in politics here and abroad about widespread distrust towards mainstream media and the rise of social media is the principal source of information for many.

Social scientists have a name for it: triangulation. The more independent media outlets reporting about the same issue or event, the more confident we are that we are getting all possible angles to the news of the day. The implications of just one or two giant business interests gatekeeping what gets to be reported as news by various media outlets should give us pause.

Media companies are a-typical in the sense that while on the one hand, they are supposed to serve the public interest in some way, the model that has so far proved sustainable, if barely for most, is that of a profit-driven, business enterprise. Therein lies a seemingly irreconciliable dialectic. In Philippine experience at least, we have not seen much of a media enterprise that is not just one of many interests across different business sectors owned by the same business empire, family-owned or otherwise.

This all the more drives home the point about the necessity of the state itself stepping in by setting up an effective system of checks and balances against media monopolization. In any case, as the discussion has already shown, it is not just a legal duty but a constitutional one for the state. While we have benefitted greatly from the earnest cultivation of individual freedoms, we have however neglected that other set of constitutional protections against media concentration that also threatens the same freedoms, if in a more insidious way.

In much of theorizing on structural pluralism in relation to civil society, the plurality of non-state actors participating in public discourse is seen as a normative goal; it presents a buffer to state overreach, and primordially, a mediating layer between individuals and the state.

In another, though, relevant context – on the question of the regulation of political advertising, that is – J. Mendoza has written about the constitutional command against political inequalities that justifies government regulation and the deep principle he refers to rings through for our concern as well:

The notion that the government may restrict the speech of some in order to enhance the relative voice of others may be foreign to the American Constitution. It is not to the Philippine Constitution, being in fact an animating principle in the document. Indeed, Art. IX-C [Sec. 4] is not the only provision in the Constitution mandating political equality. Art. XIII, [Sec. 1] requires Congress to give the `highest’ priority to the enactment of measures designed to reduce political inequalities, while Art II, [Sec. 26] declares as a fundamental principle of our government ‘equal access to opportunities for public service.’ Access to public office will be denied to poor candidates if they cannot even have access to mass media in order to reach the electorate. What fortress principle trumps or overrides these provisions for political equality?[5]

A side remark: in the latest case of GMA v. Comelec, the Supreme Court has unfortunately made a counter-intuitive ruling that defeats the purpose for which the Fair Elections Act was passed in the first place; the ruling practically gives the moneyed candidates more room to wiggle and reverses Osmena in the result, even if it upholds its original intent. But perhaps, this situation only points to the fact that we need more than regulation of political advertising if we want wide-ranging electoral reforms: we have to look at the necessity of campaign finance and party system reforms, to begin with.

Media monopolization courts the danger of speech being shaped by and directed towards a dominating commercial interest.

In the language of jurisprudence, it is in the “substantial interest” of government to regulate media monopolization precisely for that reason.

Yet, as this study has shown, we face multiple challenges to establishing media pluralism.

To begin with, there are various structural issues that require our immediate attention.

First, there is the seemingly incoherent system of rules concerning the intersection of mass media and public utilities. Such incoherence has often resulted in lax or incompetent regulation.

Second, there is the lack of a dedicated media authority that specifically deals with monopolistic arrangements. What obtains is a system of several overlapping institutions that deal separately with franchise, standards and competition. What this means is that it is difficult to develop administrative competence with a deep appreciation and respect for media pluralism and freedom where the authority to regulate is widely dispersed. The current system also requires close coordination between and among regulatory agencies but this coordination depends to a large extent on a proactive and enlightened regulators.

Third, there is the ever-present specter of regulatory capture. Constitutional and legal requirements on ownership of public utilities and media outfits have been ostensibly rendered ineffective by half-hearted regulation. This regulatory failure has a direct effect on the form and shape of the Philippine media landscape.

Fourth, related to this is the lack of legal safeguards against conflicts of interest of regulators. Very little legislation has been made to address this “revolving door” – the quick transition of individuals from working as a public officer to a private employee, and vice versa.

In this situation, public officers often have to deal with the moral hazard of exercising discretion in a manner that may unduly benefit private companies with the expectation that they may eventually exploit such benefits as a potential hire in the future. Similarly, newly elected or appointed public officers from the private sector may unduly use insider information obtained in their prior employment to create unfair advantages for their industry or company.

To date, only the PCC’s enabling law has a meaningful set of qualifications required of its commissioners designed to avoid such situations of conflict. This calls for a wide-ranging legislative reform.

Fifth, there is the issue of media ownership transparency. This exercise in legal assessment has also shown how current rules on corporate disclosure are inadequate to address the established phenomenon of corporate lawyering. Even anti-dummy legislation appears inadequate to address the problem, precisely because corporate layering requires active investigation beyond what is available on the face of corporate papers filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. At the same, as seen in the Gamboa ruling, regulatory agencies themselves appear to be remiss in their legal duty to enforce regulation. Transparency is important, given the strong tendency we see of interlocking ownerships of media businesses in the Philippines.

To close: the current hype given to the “convergence” of public utilities, mass media and new media promises to present a greater challenge to the cause of democratizing media, if we follow Tiglao’s pointed allegations about the vertical and horizontal reach of the Salim empire in the Philippines.

Winthrop Yu, the President of the Philippine chapter of the Internet Society, has shared with me in an online conversation a thought experiment – that is, posit a contest between two teams consisting of the existing “duopolies”, PLDT and Globe v. GMA and ABS-CBN. “If the barriers between media and telcos were lowered, which doupoly would prevail and eventually dominate the medium and the message?” he asks.

He said he would place his bet on PLDT and Globe. “Thus, the threat to democratic space.”

I think he is not in the wrong, if we consider that there are now probably more smartphones than television units in the country. If Internet penetration reaches more Filipinos in the next few years, such a “convergence” will rule the day.

Leslie Green continues his critique of his Oxford colleague John Gardner on the relation between law and morality. Here he engages Gardner’s point about the “inescapability of morality” in relation to law — that law is judged by morality, if law isn’t in some way, a moral norm by itself, or a “near natural law.”

The discussion echoes but couldn’t quite identify, the multi-aspectual view, where “positive law” in fact functions in all aspects of reality — it has a moral, social, economic, aesthetic, lingual or historical sides, and so on.As Alan Cameron, who edited the first volume of HD’s Encyclopedia of the Science of Law, put it to me recently, the process of law forming “is not merely the positivisation of a jural norm. It also requires the positivisation of analytical, lingual, social, economic and possibly aesthetic norms. An individual law has it own ‘individuality’ structure – it is some “thing” jurally qualified but displays all the modal aspects (subjectively and objectively).”

Thus a contract is not merely a legal document, it also has a social dimension, or functions in the social realm, as it has a certain history and an economic value (as the sociologists of law have been trying to show).

It should be interesting to note that in HD’s modal scale, the ethical (moral) aspect comes after the legal aspect. Law is prior and foundational to, and anticipates, morality. So there is some correspondence between HD’s and Gardner’s notion of morality, as the former in fact says that the ethical aspect deepens the legal aspect in the process of disclosure.

The Philippine Society of International Law has just posted a Call for Papers for its first National Conference this September. The PSIL National Conference is a prelude to the 7th Biennial Conference of the Asian Society of International Law, which it will host in Manila next year.

The PSIL has a distinguished lineage, having been founded in 1961 by the late Justice Florentino Feliciano.

This is the first time in so many years that a conference dedicated to international law in this scale will be mounted hereabouts.

1. IHL prohibits acts of terrorism on the part of parties to an armed conflict.

2. Parties to an armed conflict are those of sufficient organization and structure as to be able to recognize and observe the laws and rules of war.

3. This goes for both international armed conflicts, where of course, the parties are states so the question of organization is evidently met (Fourth Geneva Convention) and non-international armed conflicts ( Two Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions), where usually, the parties are non-state actors ranged against the state, or non-state actors fighting one another. The Geneva Conventions are part of Philippine law by way of the Constitution’s treaty clause (as we are parties to them) and by way of the incorporation clause, as they also form part of customary international law.

4. In IHL, terrorism is not defined but acts designed to spread terror among the civilian populace in an armed conflict are tagged as “acts of terror” that are illegal and criminal in nature. In other words, there is a distinction made in IHL between status and act. A group may have the status of a party to an armed conflict, whether non-international or international and yet may be prosecuted for war crimes for engaging in acts of terror.

5. Generally, IHL is not applied to groups that are considered no more than terrorist in nature. IHL does not apply to the latter, as in the first place, it rejects the rules and laws of war.To date, the ICRC does not consider ISIS/ISL as a rebel group or as a state fighting a transnational war (despite its claim that it is waging a war to establish a Caliphate in Iraq and Syria). A briefing paper of the ICRC puts it thus:

With respect to the phenomenon of armed groups that are perceived as having a global reach, such as al-Qaeda or the Islamic State group, the ICRC does not share the view that an armed conflict of global dimensions is, or has been, taking place. This would require, in the first place, the existence of a ‘unitary’ non-State party opposing one or more States. Based on available facts, there are not sufficient elements to consider the al-Qaeda ‘core’ and its associated groups in other parts of the world as one and the same party within the meaning of IHL. The same reasoning also applies, for the time being, to the Islamic State group and affiliated groups.

Indeed, the Wall Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice denies recognition to groups organizing a state that wantonly and openly violate IHL and IHRL.

6. In practice, terrorist groups are often prosecuted for common crimes under domestic law in various jurisdictions.

7. In fact, no other state in the world — not even any Islamic one –has recognized ISIS/ISL as a legitimate political group engaged in a non-international armed conflict or a war for national liberation. Yet admittedly, there is vigorous debate on the continuing relevance of the general rule just mentioned, given the many acts tantamount to war crimes being committed by ISIS and its affiliated groups around the world. It remains to be seen whether the status/act distinction can be extended such that terror groups may be prosecuted for war crimes under IHL but remain classified as terror groups. What ‘s at stake is nothing less than the viability of civilizational norms. Taking off from the ICRC paper, a relevant question is whether the ISIS affiliates in the Philippines such as the Abu Sayaff and the Maute Group have at least achieved such an organized status as being able to meet the threshold for waging a non-international armed conflict. It is worth noting that previous to Marawi, the government has treated these two groups as groups merely engaged in criminality.

8. However, in Lagman v. Medialdea, the Philippine Supreme Court elevated the ISIS-allied Maute group to a political group by agreeing with the Executive Department’s contention that they are a group that has launched a rebellion to establish an Islamic state in Marawi City. The question of course is whether this also means characterizing the rebellion as a non-international armed conflict. Associate Justice Leonen also pointed to this apparent incongruence in his dissent to the majority opinion with these two trenchant paragraphs:

Elevating the acts of a lawless criminal group which uses terrorism as tactic to the constitutional concept of rebellion acknowledges them as a political group. Rebellion is a political crime. We have acknowledged that if rebels are able to capture government, their rebellion, no matter how brutal, will be justified. Also, by acknowledging them as rebels, we elevate their inhuman barbarism as an “armed conflict of a non-international character” protected by International Humanitarian Law. We will be known worldwide as the only country that acknowledges them, not as criminals, but as rebels entitled to protection under international law.

9. The next question is whether characterizing the siege of Marawi as an NIAC could mean the reverse; that is, also granting the Mautes legitimacy as a group with political aims.

(This is a slightly different version of a post I made on my Facebook account. Photo credit, Abante Tonite).

I first posted about my re-reading of the journals of the late Polish dissident Kazimierz Brandys here.

In this day and age of “alternative facts”, it’s interesting to read an entry in his journals (p. 96-97) about what passed for such in his own time. In 1948, as a young Socialist, he and other Polish writer, the poet Konstanty Galczynski, were invited to Russia to attend a commemoration of the October Revolution.

Arriving in the nick of time to the Bolshoi Theater where the ceremonies were being held, he and his compatriot were shown to their seats as the flashbulbs of cameras burst one after the other; he could very well remember that there were four rows of seats up on the stage, with 12 people on them. Stalin was absent, but for his huge portrait in the backdrop. Molotov was presiding on the podium. Brandys recognized a few Politburo men on the first row — Mikoyan, Boroshilov. On the second row, he could not miss Marshal Budeny’s distinctive black moustache. The third and fourth rows were occupied by less familiar faces, “people wearing dark suits and uniforms.”

He writes on:

I saw it all quite clearly with Molotov standing at the podium, lit by flashbulbs. He spoke for over an hour, stuttering each time he said Stalin’s name: “St-St-Stalin.” During the entire speech, the stage, the red table, and the four rows of the presidium were before my eyes…after the meeting, we were taken back to our hotel. We ate dinner; then Galcznyski and I fell asleep on the wide double bed. I was up first in the morning, awakened by a rustling sound at the door. Still Sleepy, I jumped out of bed and noticed the edge of a paper that had been slipped under the door. It was a copy of Pravda, redolent of fresh ink.

Most of the front page was taken up by a photo showing the opening of the commemorative meeting: Molotov at the podium, the presidium table with Malenkov in the middle….I scrutinized the photograph. There were only two rows of chairs behind the table; the third and the fourth had vanished, replaced by a uniformly dark background. I was unable to grasp what the photograph was presenting. The truth? A fiction? both? Or was I seeing things?

I finally woke up Galcynzski and handed him the paper. Neither of us knew what to think.

When the two of them returned to Poland, they went to see the poet Adam Wazyk, to seek his counsel. Wazyk had spent the war in Russia; surely he knew more about the Russian mindset than both of the. And so, they handed to them the offending copy of Pravda as the poet sat in the editorial offices of the newspaper Kuznica (The Forge).

The poet’s response:

He looked at me with all the dignity of a Siamese cat and asked me just what I wanted to know and what I did find so surprising. I told him that there had been a third and fourth row, and so why weren’t they in the picture?

“That’s simple,” said Wazyk. “The people in the third and fourth rows still don’t deserve to be seen in an edition of several million copies.”

All right then, I persisted, but that means that the photograph isn’t true.

I’ve taken recently to re-reading the journals of the late Polish dissident writer Kazimierz Brandys (A Warsaw Diary, 1978-1981).

An entry from October 1978, p. 11-12:

The contemporary world does not belong to the Age of Reason; it is convulsed by a desire for faith. As a layman living outside the church, my epoch ages me. I feel an anachronism in it, sometimes alien, superfluous. Especially since I usually felt distaste for the type of person and the kind of life that express themselves through religion. I was a student when I halted in front of the steps of a rather old temple, asking myself, Should I turn back or enter? I entered. For me socialism was not a confession of dogmatic faith; I went in because it was battling against a barbaric church that was hostile to me — fascism. Socialism’s nineteenth-century past had earned my respect, attracted me to its legends, the lives of it heroes, its ethical tension. And also by its modest liturgy, it’s simple ways. A table, a chair, a speaker, a discussion. And so, I thought I professed no dogmas. Already I had a gospel. It is without irony that I think of this today. And I have no intention of reducing the significance of socialism in my life. And not only in my life. In history, culture. If i had to name the most important phenomena in our era, I would say the Roma Catholic Church, the Reformation, and socialism. I would further add that these constitute the historical trinity that delineates my understanding of Christianity.

Thus, when saying”church”, I am using the word in a broader sense. For me, it includes ideological orders and organized state religions. Today, the universal Catholic Church is carrying out its mission in a world terrorized by new inquisitions and crusades. The churches of anarchism and nationalism are killing people. The churches of the totalitarian states are killing life itself. Both the former and the latter use torture. And both have their believers and unbelievers. Society seems to be conscious of the religious character of contemporary life [emphasis supplied].

————-

Human beings are, in the most fundamental of senses, religious. We are homo adorans. We exhibit, possess, are oriented and answer to, ultimate commitments.